DevOps on AWS

DevOps on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the combination of social philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. The speed of DevOps on AWS enables organizations to serve their customers better and compete more effectively in the market.

The breadth and depth of AWS services are genuinely staggering. Whether it’s development, quality assurance, operations, or security, there are tools to fit into every part of your DevOps journey; these services, if implemented correctly, can be leveraged at a global enterprise scale. The goal is to reach continuous integration and continuous delivery, and with the litany of services available, reaching that goal is easier than ever before.

History of DevOps

DevOps is a collection of different software development practices that aim to bridge collaboration between software development and information technology operation teams. The goal of establishing DevOps within an organization is to shorten development lifecycles while providing more frequent updates.This allows organizations to deliver content to market faster with a lower failure rate due to increased communications.

In2007, agile software developers, Andrew Schafer and Patrick Debois, mused over the idea of establishing a more seamless avenue of communication between development and operations teams. The idea wasn't communicated in mass until Flickr employees, John Allspaw, Senior Vice President of Technical Operations, and, Paul Hammond, Director of Engineering, gave a presentation that hadbeenentitled'10+ Deploys per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr.' Both Allspaw and Hammond asserted that the only way forward for application development was for both developers and operations teams to cooperate, creating a more integrated experience.

This integrated DevOps experience is not merely asuite of solutionsto install, although Amazon AWS does indeed helpwith pre-packagedtoolsets. DevOps is a philosophy andculture- a radical new way of developing software and delivering results in atimelier, andmoreefficient, manner.Vandisgoes beyond dropping DevOps tools into the hands of our clients. Wetakethe time to introduce the philosophies and practices that create a strong DevOps environment.

Benefits of DevOps

DevOps might be a fantastic software development philosophy, but how does it translate to the real world? As an organization, you might wonder what improvements and benefits you would see from implementing DevOps practices into your pipeline. Our team can help to achieve powerful DevOps strategies that observe the following benefits:

Faster Deployment: With a more efficient pipeline, developers and operation team members can work together more seamlessly,enabling your organization to deliver results faster than typical philosophies and practices.

Faster to Market: Faster deployment means a faster time to marketand a better chance to gain a competitive advantage. Those who are first to market are more likely to establish stronger brand recognition and customer loyalty due to their presence.

Lower Failure Rate: With better communication between development and operations teams, DevOps can help to introduce a lower failure rate of new releases. With more frequent, smaller updates, organizations can take more minute control over the development process.

Shortened Time Between Fixes: The ability for teams within your organization to work together seamlessly leads to a decrease in common workplace obstacles. A DevOps philosophy enables quick communication between departments, allowing for issues to be identified and resolved faster.

More Time For Innovation: With less time spent fixing bugs, teams who adopt a DevOps philosophy caninnovate faster. Stop wasting time fixing mistakes, invest in the factors that help differentiate your product from your competitors.

Vandis’ DevOps Strategy

We have AWS, infrastructure automation, and DevOps practices to best support the needs of our clients. Our DevOps team can help your organization seamlessly integrate complex sets of security policies and tools utilizing automation, configuration management, and continuous integration workflows; this will allow our clients to maintain a consistent security posture across all platforms and services.

Our DevOps practice believes in the importance of creating secure and automated code pipelines, creating application security, portability, and resiliencewhile removing the element of human error. Having infrastructure automation capabilities isvitalin the process of creating a mature application environment. The ability to utilize infrastructure as code to quickly spin up or make changes to workloads allows organizations totake advantage of what the cloud has to offer.

Vandis can guide you towards building a healthy deployment and integration strategy to provide the highest quality software at the lowest cost in the shortest time.

AWS DevOps Tools

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a variety of different tools built directly into the platform that aid organizations in adopting a DevOps approachwith cloud computing.Thanks to the team at Amazon, deploying to the cloud with a DevOps strategy has never been as easythanks to these tools:

Software Release Workflows with AWS Code

AWS CodePipeline is a continuous integration and continuousdeploymentservice for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates; it allowsorganizationstoautomate release processes withconsistentresultsand more time to focus on what matters – deliveringa positive experienceto your userbase.

Build and Test Code with AWS CodeBuild

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy.Thanks to continuous scaling, you can adjustAWS to meet your build needs– no more waiting in a queue.

Deployment Automation with AWS CodeDeploy

AWS CodeDeploy automates code deployments to any instance, including Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers.With CodeDeploy,your organization can reducedowntimewhile also rolling back deployments if errors are discovered.

Private Git Hosting with AWS CodeCommit

AWS CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service that makes it easy for companies to host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories. CodeCommitallows for collaborationwithotherdevelopers andincreasesthe speed of development lifecycles.

Serverless Computing with AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration.Merely upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability.

Production Docker Platform with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.

Templated Infrastructure Provisioning with AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.

Vandis’ DevOps Capabilities

Fromstrategyconsulting to secure pipeline deploymentto version control, the engineering team at Vandis can help to assure your DevOps adoption with AWS is as smooth as possible.Whether you need a helping handor a complete strategic solution,Vandis is here to help.

DevOps Strategy Consulting:If you’re on your way to infrastructure as code,continuousintegration/continuousdelivery, or leveraging serverless solutions for self-healing applications, we can act as a sounding board and offer our insight across what we have seen in the industry– we are here toassist yourteam along the wayand decrease uncertainty.

Secure Pipeline Deployment:When you're managing multiple environments within a development cycle, it can be difficult to reliably and securely promote code between domains. The engineers at Vandis can help to assure that pipeline deployment is no longer a question mark when it comes to security. Keep your projects secure, no matter where they lead.

Application Refactoring for Cloud:Thejob isn’tfulfilledwhen the lift-and-shiftoperationis complete. Once your infrastructure is in the cloud,the next step is breaking apart monolithic applications to take advantage of the elastic nature of AWS. We can help identify, quantify, and execute application transformation, allowing your organization to adapt touncertain futures.

Version Control:Whether an on-premise or in a cloud repository, all configurations and changes that are made will be checked in and out to provide a documented process of what files have been made or modified over time. Version Control creates a recovery opportunity if there is a problem with the code, allowing it to be rolled back to a previous version; this will enable you to identify when the issue had developed initially.